


Everybody's Wonderin'

by thelightninginme



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Coming Out, Gratuitous flashbacks, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Past Torture, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), not much though, this one got away from me a bit, well maybe a little comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-24 19:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17709815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelightninginme/pseuds/thelightninginme
Summary: At a loss for what to do next, Steve returns to New York, to the only family he has left, and has a late night conversation with Bucky's niece where she asks a pointed question and Steve gets a few things off his chest.





	Everybody's Wonderin'

_Some say once gone you’re gone forever_

_And some say you’re going to come back_

_Some say you rest in the arms of the Savior_

_If in sinful ways you lack_

_Some say that they’re coming back in a garden_

_Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas_

_I think I’ll just let the mystery be_

 

* * *

 

Steve wraps his hands around a warm mug of coffee, and waits for the familiar sounds of the city at night to provide whatever comfort it can. But the night is so quiet. And then he remembers New York is missing half its people, and he has to close his eyes until the wave of nausea passes. There’s nowhere really that he wants to be, but he supposes the front steps of Louise’s brownstone is as good a place as any. 

_“I don’t know if you’re alive or okay, but your phone is at least going to voicemail, and Bucky’s isn’t, so can you please give me a call, or a text, let me know if you’re okay, if he’s okay,”_  was the surprisingly even voicemail he had from Louise’s daughter Grace.  _“My mom’s beside herself. My best friend nearly died in a car wreck, and the other car had no driver. My cousin Becky just is gone. So please, if you can give me a call.”_  

So he texted her back.  _He’s gone, too._  And it felt wrong to reduce Bucky’s loss to three words, but he also knew he couldn’t speak them aloud, not yet. 

Grace’s reply, when it came, was equally terse.  **Thanks. I’ll tell her**  

He thought of Louise getting that news for the second time in her life. He thought of the little girl she used to be, a sweet thing that clambered into his lap any chance she got.  _How is she?_ he texted Grace, the next day. He expected to be busy, but the rest of the world is as stunned as he is. 

**Ok. She cried a lot when i told her and asked how you were holding up**

_would it help if I came to see her?_  

**I think it would, if you could spare the time**

What the fuck else is he supposed to do with his time, he thought, but he didn’t say that. Instead he simply promised to be there as soon as he could. So that’s how Steve went back to New York for the first time in the past few years, to visit Bucky’s littlest sister, who pulled him into her arms before he was even over the threshold. 

She put her soft, wrinkled hands on his cheeks and said his name, very softly. “Steve. I’m so sorry.” 

The Barnes family, Steve learned, came out of it exceptionally well, given their size and given the odds. Bucky, Steve thought, would be glad to know this. Besides Bucky, they’ve lost Becca’s oldest granddaughter, and the husband of one of Jean’s sons. 

Steve went in thinking he would be the strong one for Louise, for the little girl in his memory, but she was an old woman now that had lived a long life, seen her grandparents and her parents and her siblings laid to rest and lived on after them. And the tenderness with which she fussed over Steve, brushing an invisible speck of dirt off his shoulder and smoothing the hair from his face, shook something loose in him. 

“I’m sorry, Lou,” he managed. “I tried to stop it.” 

“I know, darling.” 

“It wasn’t enough.” It was never enough. 

It’s like mourning Bucky over and over in an endless loop is the price the universe has decided that Steve must pay for living past his thirtieth birthday like the doctors never said he would. All things considered, maybe it would’ve just been better to die an asthmatic twenty-something.

So he sits on Louise’s stoop as the night progresses, since he has nothing better to do. The coffee grows cold in his trembling hands and silent tears streak down his face, because apparently Steve can’t even cry like a normal human being anymore. 

After some indeterminate length of time the front door swings open behind him. “Can I join you?” asks Grace, and there’s a desperate note in her voice. 

‘No, please go away,’ is what he wants to say, but well, he can’t really say that, can he? For a couple of reasons. For one thing, he’s sort of always been like the fifth Barnes kid and though he’s not sure Grace would return the sentiment, he’s come to think of her like his own family. For another, it’s her front steps. And lastly, a broken heart is no excuse to be rude. 

He mops his face on his sleeve. “Only if you don’t mind me being terrible company.” 

Grace settles in on the step beside him. There’s a mug in her hand, too. “Not if you don’t mind that I took some of your coffee.” 

“I just put another pot on. It’s your house. Your coffee.” 

She brushes a strand of hair behind her ears, adjusts her glasses. He’s known her now for what, five, six years? He remembers, when he first met her, being struck by the fact that her hair was the exact shade of Bucky’s, and now it’s streaked with gray. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “Mom’s finally sleeping. She’s been a little more at ease since you got here. She was up all night on the phone with Jim last night. They just cried and cried.” 

“Can’t imagine losing a child like that,” he murmurs, thinking of Becca’s bright and spirited granddaughter, the spitting image of her grandmother, and her broken father. 

“Mom looked so bad this morning, Steve, I just thought - she’s not going to bounce back from it, this is the thing that’s going to - ” Grace puts a hand over her mouth and sobs once, twice, three times, then places her hand on her chest, takes a long shuddery breath, and sips her coffee like nothing happened. 

Steve’s not ready for Louise to die, either. Not his last living link to the past. “Grace. I’ll stay as long as you both need me to.”

“That’s kind of you.” 

He shakes his head. “It’s selfish. It’s me wanting to be near someone who knew - who gets it.”

Grace is quiet for a long moment. “She said she already grieved Bucky once.” 

“It doesn’t get any easier.” He has to fight to get the words up and around the weight sitting somewhere between his chest and his throat. 

At this Grace turns and looks at him, really looks at him for a long moment. Steve shifts uncomfortably under her gaze. She reaches out and tentatively lays a hand on his arm. “Is there anything I can do?” she asks quietly. 

“Don’t think so, but thanks.” 

She nods, but she doesn’t take her hand, warm from the coffee mug, from his arm. 

“Can I ask you something?” Grace says after a long silence, and when she removes her hand from his arm Steve realizes she winding up a good one. 

“Sure.” 

“It’s very personal and I probably have no right to ask you this, but it does sort of feel like you’re part of the family - ”

“What is it, Grace?” Though he has a feeling he knows what curveball she’s about to throw. 

“You and Bucky - were you - ?” And there’s the pitch. He gets the sense she’s been wondering this a while. 

“Yep.” 

Whatever response she was expecting, a one syllable affirmation was not it. “Oh,” she manages, and then a moment later she returns her hand to his arm. “Then I’m even sadder for you than I was five minutes ago,” she says softly. 

“When we were young. And during the war, anyway. When he was getting better, it was pretty touch and go, but…we were circling back there.” 

“Did anyone else know?” 

“We never told anyone. But people put two and two together. Peggy knew. And the Howlies. Not a lot of space for big secrets in a situation like that. My friends Sam and Natasha know. Becca knew.” 

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. You couldn’t get anything past her. Pretty sure my good Catholic mother knew. I think she ultimately decided to make her peace with it, since at least I wouldn’t be alone when she died. Don’t know about your grandparents. Your grandmother, maybe. Your grandfather, definitely not.” 

“He was hard on Bucky, wasn’t he?” 

“Sure. Oldest kid and only son.” 

“Did Mom know?” 

“She was barely out of pigtails when we left. She couldn’t have known then. But now, I think she does, at least on some level.” 

“I think so too. I think that’s why she’s been so worried about you.”

“Everybody’s lost someone.” He looks sideways at her as she takes another gulp of coffee. He’s more than ready to turn the conversation away from himself. “What about your friend, the one you mentioned on the phone? That was in the car accident.” 

“Uh,” Grace says to her coffee cup. “Well. She hasn’t regained consciousness. The doctor said that if she does she’ll probably never walk again. And if she does I have to tell her that her babies are gone.” She sobs again, but this time she doesn’t stop. This time she props her elbow on her knee and rests her forehead in her hand, and cries, shoulders heaving. 

When Steve was angry and sick and small enough that his mother still had hope he would grow out of it, she told him briskly, “There is always someone who has it just as bad, if not worse, than you do, Steven. Maybe try helping that person instead of feeling sorry for yourself.” 

So he hesitates for half a moment, and then he slips his arm around Grace’s shoulders. She leans against him just a little, and he draws her a little tighter against his side.

She said she felt sadder for him once she understood what he and Bucky were to each other. Steve feels closer to her too, now. She’s only the second person he’s ever spoken of it aloud to before. 

Sam was the first, when Steve was in the hospital after Bucky fished him out of the Potomac. Sam gripped his shoulder, while Steve blubbered semi-coherently for a while ( _“He didn’t let me drown, he didn’t finish it, Christ, and I broke his arm - ”_ ). 

It was like I was there just to watch him fall. Steve couldn’t get those words out of his head; they were one of the main reasons why he’d suggested to Natasha that they go to Sam to lie low. What Sam had lost in Riley was a lot like what Steve had lost in Bucky, and they both knew it. But that afternoon in the hospital, something shifted in Sam’s face, and Steve realized he was thinking of all the ways it was different, too. 

Half an hour and a bunch of ice chips later, Steve broke the silence. “Me and him. It is what you think it is.” 

Sam leaned back in his chair, nodding. “Okay,” he said, tone carefully neutral. “Cool.” He shook his head in mock disappointment. “The Captain America picture book I got in first grade left out a  _lot_.” Steve smiled at this, even though it made the stitches in his face tug painfully. 

No, Sam was more disturbed after the two of them cleared out their first Hydra base. It wasn’t even really a base, just an abandoned safehouse, the location they’d picked up on from the files on Bucky that Natasha acquired for him. 

They grabbed whatever paper files looked even remotely useful, and then turned their attention to the computer. It was pretty old, per Sam - a clunky plastic tower attached to an even clunkier CRT monitor. Like the yellowing paper, the files on the computer were of dubious value. There were video files in a folder labeled simply, ‘Asset’, and before whether Steve could really decide whether he wanted to, he clicked on one dated 1999-08-11. 

The footage was grayscale and grainy, and there was no audio, but he didn’t need audio to hear the backhand slap by the handler that would’ve knocked Bucky out of the chair if he wasn’t strapped into it. 

“Jesus Christ,” Sam said, sounding very far away. “Steve?” 

But Steve barely heard him, his eyes darting between the figure of Bucky in the chair and Alexander Pierce, safely out of reach, giving unheard orders. A Hydra scientist moved into frame and began to prod at Bucky’s metal arm. It’s not strapped down, and Steve realized it must have been damaged. The scientist on the screen used some impossible-to-distinguish tool to disengage it effortlessly, then used that same tool to dig in to the space on Bucky’s shoulder where flesh met metal. And then Bucky screamed, and Steve didn’t need audio to hear that scream, the one he’s heard reverberating around his skull since 1945. 

The tape reached its conclusion. The monitor went black. Steve put his fist through his own distorted reflection. His split knuckles healed in about twelve hours. Steve didn’t speak for about forty-eight. 

Sam took this pretty well in stride, only asking Steve the simplest yes or no questions. He was on his phone a lot, though. Texting Natasha, Steve thought. 

This was confirmed when Sam said, “It’s good data. I sent some of it over to Nat. There’s good intel there, she says. Stuff that will help prove it wasn’t his fault.” Or yours, is what goes unspoken. 

“I know,” Steve sighed. It was the first thing he’s said since they found the tape. Pierce should have died very slowly, and Steve should have been the one to kill him. 

Steve has always been angry, after all, ever since he was old enough to understand that most children did not spend the majority of their summer vacations in bed. He was angry at the unfairness of the world. Angry at the unfairness of his ragged body, and how it made him unfit for what scant work there was to be had, and angry that Bucky had to pull double, triple shifts for a roof over their heads and scraps on the table. There was half a second during the war when Steve wasn’t angry, because he was strong and he could actually do something about all the things that made him angry, or so he thought. 

Then a mission brought them face to face with one of Bucky’s captors at Azzano. Bucky  launched himself at the man with a recklessness more characteristic of Steve and brought his fist into the man’s face over and over again until Steve pulled him off. And as Bucky sobbed and Steve held his bloody fists, Steve realized he was as powerless as he’d always been. 

Waking up seventy years in the future made him more sad than angry. After all, there were good things in the future, not the least of which were his new friends, which helped. Having aliens to punch every so often helped, too. 

Then Hydra, and the joy and agony of seeing Bucky again, and the debilitating fury when he thought too long about what had been done to the person he’d loved his whole life. A fury that had only begun to cool at the sight of Bucky backlit against a Wakandan sunset, long-haired and unkempt, his eyes closed in the early evening breeze. 

That is the image Steve clings to the hardest. And sitting in the cool night air, holding on to Bucky’s niece while she cries, it starts to bubble up again, that anger, and it’s such a relief to feel something other than hurt. 

Eventually her sobs die down. Grace shifts out from under Steve’s arm and stands, slowly and stiffly. “Thanks for the company. I think I’ll - try to get some sleep.” 

“I’ll be in a little later,” he lies. “And Grace?” 

She pauses, her hand on the doorknob. 

“We’re going to do something,” he says. “I don’t know what, but…something.” He doesn’t turn back to look at her, because he doesn’t want to see the skepticism on her face. 

**Author's Note:**

> That Super Bowl spot, man.
> 
> This one was exciting and scary to write because it is the most I’ve ever written from Steve’s POV, and because I’ve never written Steve and Bucky as being explicitly romantic before. In everything else I’ve written they’ve existed in a weird space between platonic and romantic. Call it Schrodinger’s ship.
> 
> The title and opening lyrics are from “Let the Mystery Be” by Iris DeMent, which also served as the opening credits to season 2 of HBO’s The Leftovers, a show about what happens when 2% of the world’s population disappears suddenly (spoiler alert: everyone is Not Okay). “It’s a really good show and you should watch it!!!” is the most annoying sentence in the English language, so I won’t say that, but I will say I am really digging the Leftovers vibe I got from the Super Bowl spot. Particularly Steve’s line about not moving on, which reminded me of an exchange in the first episode, where in response to the town’s plan for a memorial service on the one year anniversary of the disappearance, a character says, “No one is ready to feel better. They’re ready to fucking explode.”
> 
> Endgame is gonna be so fun!!!!!!


End file.
